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Sunday, 17 February 2013

“Somewhere over the rainbow, again!” said a silk pajama-clad Marc Jacobs
backstage at his show. Fashion’s Wizard of Oz certainly took us on
another remarkable journey into his febrile imagination, presenting a
collection of outstanding, understated chic that was eerily magical. The
set, designed with Stefan Beckman, was a vast circular stage, lit by a
giant bitter yellow sun. That light sucked the color from everything in
its glow so that the audience in the amphitheater was reduced to a study
in moody grays a single red hat and sweater the only dash of color in
the entire space, as though retouched in an ancient daguerreotype.

Enjoy the Marc Jacobs FW 2013/14 fashionshow video at the end of this post!

Love, Andrea

The
light stayed this way as the girls appeared, in their feather-cut
sixties wigs. Dark, light, midtone, reflective, and matte became the
only criteria to judge the tonality by, throwing all the focus on the
silhouettes and the attitude. And Jacobs’s silken pajamas semaphored the
message of unfussy ease and ultra-classic pieces. There was a vague
whiff of Biba to the clothes that magical early seventies London
emporium that purveyed Jazz Age glamour to the Twiggy set—but without
the costume-y quality that those inventive clothes had. There was a
glimmering suit with the ease of those that Coco Chanel delighted in
before the war; double-face wrap coats held together just by the
insouciant gesture of a purse crushed to the bosom; a pinstripe suit
with a forties flavor; simple bias sheath dresses gridded with a dark
mesh of beadwork and muffled with fox fur pelts; and pajama collars on
high-sheen evening jackets or prim little dresses with Peter Pan
collars. The accessories had a playfully antebellum quality:
exaggeratedly high Louis heels and clip-fastening purses in satin
embroidered in sequins to appear like fishnet.

As the last girl
made her exit, the light turned white and the first girl appeared
again, and the show was rerun in full color. Except that rather than a
rainbow revelation, the palette was as subtle and low-key as the clothes
themselves. That Chanel-esque suit turned out to be in a shadowy
metallic plaid of moody forest green; a thick alpaca dressing gown coat
was a soft smoke brown; those pajama tops had been made in stiff duchess
satin in soft shades of bois de rose and ink. That quietly glamorous
long-sleeved thirties sheath dress was in tarnished gold sequins, worn
with a muff of natural red fox, another in ruby panne velvet with an
apricot fur cape, whilst silver fox flourished at the neckline on a
short evening coat of beetle green sequins. Simple, unprovocative, and
ineffably chic, Jacobs’s collection closed the New York shows on a
crystal-shattering high C.